Opinion: In what he swears is his last column on the topic "for a while," David Coursey explains why Podcasting and blogging are self-limiting phenomena.After reading my recent columns on Weblogs and
Podcasting, a friend sent me this quote from Dave Winer, developer of the RSS format used for content distribution:
"John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. No argument, it was true, they were. Well, even though the vast majority of people have never heard of Steve [Gillmor] or myself, we're more influential than John Lennon or Bob Dylan ever were. We're media hackers."
The version of the quote that I received was from a San Jose Mercury News newsletter and appended the attribution, "Scripting News proprietor Dave Winer's last words before his ego exploded."
Well, hot news for Dave: Lennon and Dylan have influenced my life in ways blogs and Podcasts never will. But, you are right about one thing: The vast majority of people not only have never heard of you, they never will.
Dave Winer personifies the idea that blogging and Podcasting is about people with big egos looking for outlets. Nothing wrong with that, and sometimes it's interesting and entertaining, but it can also be self-indulgent to the extreme. (As opposed to these columns, which, I suppose, represent only self-indulgence in moderation.)
What will Apple's decision to support Podcasts in iTunes mean for Podcasters? Click here to read more.
As for professional content, I mentioned in an earlier column that Rush Limbaugh appears to be today's most popular Podcaster. But a reader had to fill me in on the reason why: The former drug addict's radio program has the music and commercials removed before it's posted, turning a 180-minute program into a 110-minute download.
This allows Podcast listeners to have a considerably compressed Rush experience. It also provides a welcome ability to time-shift the program. But dropping the commercials defeats the whole idea of commercial radio.
The idea of doing Podcasts because they are something cool to talk about is great, but my experience has been that a sound business model beats cool every time.
Well, almost, since there are still a few companies spending venture capital and shareholder dollars on schemes I don't understand. But the real world catches everyone eventually.
Click here to read an earlier David Coursey commentary on Podcasting.
I am not, while I am thinking about it, all that wild about RSS. Or at least the implementations I've seen so far. I am not sure how much this is a problem with RSS, or with how people are using it, or with the clients currently available.
I suspect it's a bit of all three, but suffice it to say I don't really understand why RSS belongs in a Web browser, a la Apple's Safari. If you want to show me a page of your newest content, just offer it to me. I don't need RSS for that.
Next Page: Will RSS go the way of push technology?
When thinking about RSS, I am reminded of the brief but well-hyped era of "push technology" and mid-1990s startups like BackWeb and Marimba that were its poster children. The problem with push—in which content is automatically sent (or pushed) out to clients—was that there wasn't all that much content users wanted to automatically receive that couldn't be distributed more easily or less expensively by e-mail or automatic downloads via some other mechanism.
BackWeb is still doing push, now describing itself at a leader in the "offline Web," which sounds like an oxymoron to me. Push eventually lost people's interest because it wasn't all that new or different. I wonder whether RSS won't suffer the same fate?
Meanwhile, there's another challenge facing blogs and Podcasts: people's time, or more precisely, the lack of free time. It doesn't matter how content is delivered if it's never consumed.
Whenever people start talking about online communities, I always pull out my waders, because I know it's about to get deep. I don't know anyone with a bunch of extra time, so getting someone to participate in (as opposed to merely join) an online community means something else has to go away.
So far, it's been television viewing for many, but there's a limit to how far this can go. In my case, I spend about as much time online as it is possible for me to spend while still remaining both married and employed.
So, for anything new to get into my online life, something old has to go away. By this standard, anything that doesn't offer me huge value—whether information or entertainment—won't push out what I am already doing. I am also trying very hard to cut down on the amount of content—e-mail especially—that arrives each day.
To me, blogs don't represent new content so much as a new distribution mechanism that I don't find very efficient. Blogs take too much time for the value they offer. Either that or I've just run into the wrong blogs. Which is another problem.
Podcasts are a potentially interesting way of getting specialized information in a form that will wash over me, generally while I am doing something else. It's easy to have a radio or Internet station going while I work. I'm able to barely pay attention to the stream but still catch important stuff and listen when interesting content comes on.
Given the right mechanism to find, download and play Podcasts, I might actually start listening. Of course, how someone will find and convince me to listen to their Podcast is hard to imagine, unless it's related to something I already receive.
This is the last column I plan to write about blogs and Podcasting for a while. Not surprisingly, I've been asked to appear on a couple of Podcasts to discuss why I am not wild about the new technology and the content it supports. It's hard for me to be terribly specific, except to talk about how unimpressed I've been.
The bottom line for both blogs and Podcasts is that in over 30 years in the media, I think I've learned to spot a self-limiting phenomenon when I see one. Blogs and Podcasts are but a small improvement over what's come before.
Contributing editor David Coursey has spent two decades writing about hardware, software and communications for business customers. He can be reached at david_coursey@ziffdavis.com.
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